What a week!

 Hello All-

This has been a rough week! I've been studying for an Organic Chemistry final all week and haven't made much progress with my research. My intent is to do the first part of my experiment tomorrow since it will be my first free day since last week and to begin revising my research question and hypothesis to better match my experiment.

I'm glad we got the opportunity to meet with Faculty at ASU a few weeks ago for the mixer also. I feel like I've gotten the opportunity to get familiar with them and some of the projects they work on. Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Nightmare fuel:

Waste Footprint

 Hi All-

Information from an article that has stuck with me: "For plastic products in general, there is no declaration of composition, and most commonly, not even the type of plastic is specified. The composition of the plastic product is usually only known to the supplier to some extent" (Lithner, 2012). The concept that over time, we've gone from using glass containers to using plastics for a majority of food products with little knowledge of what we're exposed to is somewhat nuts to me. Plastics are part of our lives in almost everyway possible from food containers to medical supplies to clothing. 

The United States is the world's largest generator of plastic waste (Tiseo, 2021). In 2018, we recycled 8.7% of our plastics. I hope we can continue to discover better ways of reducing our waste footprint and continue to minimize the damage we do to our ecosystem. 

Sources:

Lithner: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11356-011-0663-5#citeas

Tiseo: https://www.statista.com/topics/5127/plastic-waste-in-the-united-states/#dossierKeyfigures

Transitioning from BPA to BPS

 Hey All-

This week has felt exhausting. One of my classes is done November 18th and has required a lot of studying which has taken time from my research. I have a lot more research to do for my project before the semester is over so my rough draft is ROUGH. 

One of the things I've been looking at are the alternatives to Bisphenol A (BPA) and how they can still leak chemicals that have estrogenic activity. As we continue to move away from BPA by using other chemicals like Bisphenol S (BPS), we basically haven't solved the issue, we've bandaged it. Companies like plastics because of the durability and low cost but don't seem to see the long term effects of plastics whether that's health related or detrimental to the environment. Below is a table from the Environmental Protection Agency that outlines how much plastic is generated, how much is recycled and what ends up in the landfill.

 

Data provided by: https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/plastics-material-specific-data